On infrastructure, Winnipeg's mayoral race offers little risk and not much opportunity
Few transportation promises in campaign so far, with very little money left to make them happen
When a city has a wide-open mayoral race, as Winnipeg does right now, voters wind up weighing risk against opportunity.
While there's an opportunity to elect someone with a fresh set of ideas and a new approach to problems, voters also run the risk of electing someone who has no idea how a city works and has little chance of getting anything done until they find their way around city hall.
This dynamic has played out several times over the last 30 years. Three of Winnipeg's past four mayors came from outside city hall.
When retail store owner Susan Thompson was elected in 1992, she spent her first term learning how little Winnipeg's mayor could accomplish in a city structure where unelected senior administrators known as the Board of Commissioners had enough power to rival council.
She ended up spending much of her second and final term smashing that structure to bits and creating a "strong mayor" model she never had a chance to work with herself.
Instead, Thompson's learning curve benefited her successor, former Fort Rouge councillor Glen Murray. His election in 1998 was the only time a city hall insider has moved into the mayor's office since Bill Norrie made the jump from council in 1979.
When Murray resigned mid-term in 2004, voters took a chance on another outsider — Sam Katz, the popular owner of the Winnipeg Goldeyes. The only problem was he had few ideas: His first mayoral campaign promise was a pledge to kill mosquitoes.
To emphasize that point, someone on the 2004 "I Like Sam" campaign placed an image of a mosquito on a placard and draw a red circle around it with a line through it.
Policy experts laughed. Katz won by landslide.
After two years of finding out how council works, Katz determined Winnipeg needed to spend far more money to fix up infrastructure and build out the transportation system. During a relatively successful second term, he managed to find and borrow enough money to extend Chief Peguis Trail to the east, at a cost of $110 million, reconstruct the Disraeli Freeway for $195 million and build the $137-million first phase of the Southwest Transitway.
Katz's third term, however, was marred by scathing external audits over a contentious fire-paramedic station replacement program, questionable real estate transactions and the $214-million purchase and renovation of a new police headquarters.
That set the stage for yet another city hall outsider, former privacy lawyer Brian Bowman. He won the 2014 mayoral race by promising to make Winnipeg more open and transparent after Katz's scandal-plagued third term.
It didn't take long for Bowman to learn that pledge was a double-edged sword. When he accused True North Developments of enshrouding plans for True North Square in secrecy, company chair Mark Chipman called a rare press conference to reveal Bowman and his staff were made aware of the project months earlier.
Familiar faces in open race
While voters once again face a risk versus opportunity decision, many of the mayoral candidates this year are acquainted with public administration.
Murray is running again, with six years as Winnipeg mayor and seven as an Ontario MPP under his belt. St. James Coun. Scott Gillingham and Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood Coun. Kevin Klein have a combined 12 years of council experience.
Robert-Falcon Ouellette spent a term as a federal Liberal MP and Rana Bokhari was Manitoba's Liberal leader. Jenny Motkaluk ran for mayor in 2018. Shaun Loney conducted policy work for Gary Doer's NDP government.
This means that even with an open race, Winnipeg voters are likely to select a familiar face with some experience on Oct. 26.
That experience also explains why so few these candidates are promising the moon in this campaign when it comes to building major projects.
Anyone who looks at the city budget can see there simply isn't much money to do what Katz did during his second term.
In short, the city doesn't have much more room to borrow money — either conventionally from banks or through private-public partnerships — to further extend its transportation network.
Katz used up a lot of that room. His administration borrowed $155 million for the police headquarters instead of making a safer bet on expanding the Public Safety Building across the street from city hall. Private-public partnerships helped pay for the Disraeli and Chief Peguis Trail projects, which together still cost the city $21 million every year in financing and maintenance charges.
During Bowman's first term, Winnipeg broke the bank for three more major projects: the $467-million second stage of the Southwest Transitway, the $98-million Waverley underpass and the $88-million Plessis Road underpass.
During his second term, the money simply ran out. Winnipeg's overall debt is close to 80 per cent of its annual revenue. The self-imposed borrowing limit is 90 per cent.
The city also doesn't have any of its own money left to pay for massive new road projects or rapid transit corridors.
In 2015, the first year Bowman oversaw a Winnipeg budget, the city transferred $82 million worth of operating revenue over to the capital budget, which covers new infrastructure. In that budget, then-finance chair Marty Morantz projected those "cash to capital" transfers would rise to $95 million by 2020.
Instead, those transfers shrank dramatically. The city essentially has almost stopped shuffling cash over to capital altogether, using operating revenue instead to balance the budget without raising property taxes.
This year, the city transferred a paltry $3 million to the capital budget. The biggest new construction goodie in the 2022 capital budget was a new $13-million fire-paramedic station for Windsor Park.
There have still been some infrastructure pledges. Motkaluk says she'll extend Chief Peguis Trail to the west but has not identified where they money will come from. Gillingham promised to spend $12.5 million more on road renewals every year, but that won't mean more roads are fixed because federal and provincial funding deals are about to end.
This mayoral race has yet to see many risky promises. But there is still time: The election is 45 days away.
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